This project is part of my postdoc work in van Oudenaarden lab at @hubrechtinstitute.bsky.social. Big thanks to my co-authors and former colleagues: @agriffa.bsky.social, Peter Zeller, Helena Viñas Gaza & Alexander van Oudenaarden for their crucial contribution.
- We found the chromatin signal is predictive of the activity of transcription factors (master regulators of cell identity).
Our datasets and tools are available open-source. I think there are many interesting results worth a deeper follow-up to further understand embryonic development.
- We found that the chromatin "syncs-up" with gene activity as cells mature during embryo development.
- We saw a spreading and de-methylation dynamics of repressive chromatin that associate with switching off of developmental genes.
Using developing zebrafish embryos as a model system, our team went on to catch this epigenetic landscaping happening "in action", by applying an single-cell multiomics technology we call "whole-organism T-ChIC".
It's well known that genes in different cell types are "bookmarked" on the DNA via active or silencing epigenetic modifications. But how does this cell-type specific bookmarking and gene activity take shape, when all our cells originally come from the same single stem cell?